What’s new?
The lovely Ananova will soon be reading the news on the Press Association’s website – and working 24 hours a day without any breaks for eating or sleeping or visiting the bathroom. She is a vactor (virtual actor) or “synthespian” created by Digital Animations, and she uses text-to-speech software from Lernout & Hauspie. We’ve yet to see her in action – so far her website still only has images – but she’s claimed to have a limited amount of artificial intelligence and some human-like characteristics. You can find Ananova at www.ananova.com.
Got any friends with satellite phones? No? Cellphones or pagers, then? Aha. Well, you can now contact them all – for free – using Unimobile. A slim, fast program, it sits on your desktop, ready to send messages or reminders or CNN headlines to your cellphone or others’. It’s quicker by far than the Web-based short message system sites offered by MTN and Vodacom and reaches far more cellphone networks. ICQ aficionados will recognise it as instant messaging without the wires. It is truly a revolutionary application. The networks will hate it.
In practice, the World Wide Web only offers links from certain words and images. Seems a pity, when there are so many other words to link from. So GuruNet. com has come along and produced a piece of software that turns every word in your (Netscape or Internet Explorer) browser into a link. It gives you dictionary and encyclopaedia definitions, and a list of possible links. What more could a surfer ask for?
On similar lines, but aimed at different users, is software offered by Babylon.com, which will turn you into a multilingual surfer by translating any word you click on into one of eight langugages besides English: Spanish, German, Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Hebrew. To a large degree, it’s aimed at non-English- speaking surfers trying to navigate the English Web: don’t expect translation between Japanese and Hebrew. It’s free, so the Web’s your dictionary.
So you don’t like Windows’s habit of crash- ll ing,ll freez-ll ingl and costing the earth, you can’t afford a Macintosh, and you find the very idea of trying the free – but demanding – operating system Linux terrifying. Well, don’t feel strapped for choice. You’ve probably never heard of it, but there’s another operating system out there called BeOS – and it’s about to be re- leased free of charge on the Internet to compete on a similar basis to Linux. There’s at least one person out here who’s planning to run three different operating systems on the same PC.
Motorola, in collaboration with scientists from the United States Los Alamos National Laboratory, has invented a “battery” which should last five times longer than the batteries currently powering cellphones and notebook computers. Actually tiny fuel cells, the new power sources will combine oxygen from the air with liquid methanol in tiny canisters like fountain-pen ink cartridges, to generate electricity. But these radical devices are still five years away from the market.
Compaq, the computer manufacturer, is experimenting with a search engine that uses speech recognition software to index the content of popular American radio shows. When a search for a word or phrase is successful, the system fetches an audio clip – a sound file in RealPlayer format. This kind of system will eventually become hugely important, so it’s worth checking progress to date at speechbot.research.compaq.com.